


fratricide

by sharivan



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-16
Updated: 2016-02-16
Packaged: 2018-05-21 02:07:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6034054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sharivan/pseuds/sharivan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Returning to Orzammer is a revelation. The guards outside the city call him kinslayer and exile but they open the doors to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	fratricide

Returning to Orzammer is a revelation. The guards outside the city call him kinslayer and exile but they open the doors to him.

Safely in the hall of heroes Fenogh feels the weight of coming home. Earth overhead, stone all around, the only political forces to direct the same ones he’s known all his life. There’s nothing on the surface to compare.

His relief is short-lived. Not ten steps into the hall Zevran announces, “the dwarves worship their ancestors, if you can believe it.” Fenogh cannot. Respect is a different thing from worship, and no dwarf would look to the ancestors for intercession as the surfacers do to their gods. He’s not particularly pleased to be lectured on dwarvish customs by an elf. 

For all his bragging and blatant misunderstanding of other people’s beliefs Zevran is a familiar presence at his back; Fenogh is no stranger to assassins. He says nothing.

The guard captain scowls and the merchants in the commons don’t call his name. But Harrowmont’s estate welcomes them. It is remarkably rude not to greet them personally. A strategic error even - a show of support upon his return would bind him tight to Harrowmont’s cause. In his place, Fenogh would act differently.

The throne of Orzammer will never be his now, not if every dwarf in the city refuses to call him Aeducan. Thrashing Bhelen’s champions in a Proving, filling his youngest brother with the fear of his elders - it’s nothing Fenogh wouldn’t have suggested to Harrowmont himself.

They fall before him. With Gorim at his side his blows would have been beautiful, showy; would have demanded everyone in the arena cheer their glory. With Gorim in Denerim, untouched by Orzammer politics, Fenogh is brutally efficient. Dwarven glory holds no real appeal for his companions either; the four of them leave all challengers bleeding on the stone.

“The ancestors speak through you!” the proving master shouts when they stand alone in the ring. It’s tempting to roar about House Aeducan, about Bhelen’s unfitness to be king. He settles for a wordless scream.

That night they take over a suite in Harrowmont’s estate. The bare stone is comforting to Fenogh if no one else.

“It’s only right,” he tells them, “to share stories of our great adventures, after a victory like this.”

Morrigan smiles. “Oh, very well. You know of the Templars of course - great stupid things like the warden back at camp?” 

“Of course,” Sten tells her.

“They have a terrible habit of interfering where they’re not wanted. When I was a girl and they came too close, I would lure them to mother for her to dispatch.”

“Cleverly done. But you were only dealing with pursuers. Why, I once helped assassinate a prince. He had been a little too free with the use of his own Crows you understand -”

“Is everything settled with assassins in Antiva?” Fenogh asks. “How charmingly straightforward.” 

“Assassins tend to be charming indeed,” Zevran agrees placidly. “In any case; the king was not best pleased and hired my own band of Crows to destroy the prince. We succeeded magnificently, of course.”

“Hmmmn,” Sten says.

“I fought in the deep roads alone, when the fine nobles of the assembly and my brother, ancestors foresake him, sent me to my death. But I am still alive and even Orzammer cannot deny me.”

“And you, Sten?” Zevran asks. “Where have you been, before you came to Ferelden?”

“Many places. But surely for the moment our attention should be here.”

“How can we strategize properly without knowing each others’ strengths?”

“You have all seen me fight,” Sten protests. “My strengths are obvious.” 

Conversation drifts from there until they sleep, bodies shielded for once from weather and ghosts and decay by solid stone.

 

The carta falls. For all their clever tunnels and traps they can’t match the sheer power of fighters who grew up well-fed and far from dust town. Jarvia could have the throne and be welcome to it if she didn’t share it with Bhelen but she dies with the last of her soldiers. It’s a waste of talent - what that woman could have accomplished in the legion, or above!

“Is your home usually so chaotic?” Morrigan asks as they turned over the bodies of Bhelen’s latest attackers.

“Not _openly_. The city seems to have suffered in my absence.” Or in Endran’s. Trian’s absence certainly wasn’t responsible, may the stone watch over him.

 

The deep roads are familiar as Orzammer is not. The rock closes tighter around them and the monsters. Everything is so simple here - kill darkspawn. Take what can be salvaged. Survive.

Morrigan spends half her time as a bear to make the press of stone more bearable. She’s no less dangerous that way, not even less inclined to get in aguments. Sten compares her to a flesh-eating plant as they navigate the crumbling passageways, three humanoids and a bear nearly big enough to challenge a bronto.

“The dead trenches?” Zevran asks when they come across the first sign of paragon Branka. “Not the most cheerful name.”

“It’s named for the Legion of the Dead, not walking corpses,” Fenogh says, though the distinction is fairly forced. 

Once they enter the trenches each of them would be happy to face walking corpses a la Redcliffe again rather than the rivers of darkspawn below. There are too many to make out individuals except for the very largest, creatures they’d never seen above. Deeper, the rocks are covered in viscera like the intestines of some giant have fallen from its body still alive. It’s deeply wrong, that those who die here will not fall to bare stone.

The depths beneath the city are filled with monsters. It’s a truth Fenogh’s known since he was a boy, guards looking on from their posts as he and Gorim ran through the streets of Orzammer and bothered the soldiers at the entrance to the deep roads. The tunnels beyond the city are filled with monsters, and brave dwarves fight them, and clever dwarves are the reason the monsters are there.

Fenogh presents a crown to Harrowmont and announces the paragon gave him his choice of kings. He does not say “perhaps you shouldn’t have exiled me without a trial,” although it’s tempting. There will be time enough to settle scores in private, before he leaves to save the surface world.

Then there isn’t. Bhelen attacks - “this traitor, this _kinslayer_ , you’d trust his word?” - and then he dies, and Fenogh stands over the body of his soft-faced little brother a fratricide twice over in the eyes of Orzammer.

Harrowmont remains king. Fenogh remains not-Aeducan. When they return to the surface the sky is dizzying.

“Such a relief to be aboveground again!” Morrigan says.

“Your Orzammer is quite a city but I have missed the sun,” Zevran agrees. “The dark, the nugs, it’s no proper backdrop for her excellent intrigues.”

“Perhaps when this is finished you can show me Antiva. Why not try our hands at some aboveground intrigue?”

“Are we to rearrange each nation to suit us?” Morrigan asks. “How lovely.”

They continue east to do just that.


End file.
